tripleseven:dittybopper: They don't care about preservation of the species, unlike sport hunters.

What utter shiat.

Name a species that was *SPORT* hunted to extinction or near extinction. I bet every single species you can think of was hunted to the brink or past it not through sport hunting, but through market hunting (hunting for profit) or subsistence hunting (hunting for food).

you have pee hands:A ban enacted by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 1990 was effective in toppling the ivory trade, The New York Times notes, but that ban only lasted until 1999 when Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia were permitted to sell 50 tons of stockpiled ivory to Japan. Another sale went through in 2008 and killings soared

Well that was dumb. Keep it banned and there's a lot less reason to kill the elephants.

For money.

I've got no problem with sport hunting of elephants, but market hunting (which is what poaching is, illegal market hunting) is bad. With sport hunting, it's regulated, the trophy fees get plowed back into conservation, and everybody wins, even the elephants, because overall the balance sheet is in their favor: The protections afforded by sport hunting regulations greatly outweigh the number of individual animals taken.

Market hunters, on the other hand, are only in it for the profit. They don't care about preservation of the species, unlike sport hunters.

A ban enacted by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 1990 was effective in toppling the ivory trade, The New York Times notes, but that ban only lasted until 1999 when Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia were permitted to sell 50 tons of stockpiled ivory to Japan. Another sale went through in 2008 and killings soared

Well that was dumb. Keep it banned and there's a lot less reason to kill the elephants.